


Ponder

by skyholdherbalist



Series: Holystone [4]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 14:53:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15317925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyholdherbalist/pseuds/skyholdherbalist





	Ponder

The first sword Bryn held was not really a sword.  

It was a chipped, wooden scimitar, a toy that had wound its way to his tribe in a merchants’ trade.  He found it buried in a musty box of supplies—junk the traders could get no coin for.  When he reached in, he touched soft wood, and pulled it out by the hilt, worn smooth with age and love.  It was someone else’s favorite toy once.  

He was still young enough for toys, then.  He was still too young to take up a bow and become a hunter, though he didn’t want that.  Arrows kept you quiet, kept you far away.  

With the scimitar, he barreled toward a tree, or a friend, and attacked—gently.  Bryn smelled the sap seep from the broken bark, saw his friend’s eyes widen with surprise, then narrow as they planned their counterattack.  Arrows meant hiding, and waiting.  A sword meant a fight.          

Sometimes wolves came out of the woods.  Sometimes worse things did.  You had to stay sharp.

Another trader left behind a battered claymore.  The steel was no longer straight.  The edge was so dull it wouldn’t cut an apple.  But as soon as his hand gripped the ragged leather of the hilt, and his young arm lifted the heavy steel, he knew.  He swung it once, and his body spun with the drag of its weight.  

He stuck an old tent post deep in the ground and hacked at it, spinning and striking until he could direct that weight to hit the wood.  Until the muscles in his arms grew lean and strong.  Until the tent post split under the force of his blows.

He broke many tent posts over the years, until he left for the sea, and took the old claymore with him.  

Despite the yarns he might’ve spun, Bryn did not have much cause for swordfighting as a sailor.  He worked trade ships for couriers and merchants, trafficking food and spices, destined for polished marble tables he would never see.  

There were times, though, when the boxes held other luxuries, and treasures that were tempting.  The ship, sometimes, had rats—a manifest leaked to a dockside thug.  Or a lone ship was simply a fetching target.  A pirate doesn’t know what’s in a chest until she opens it. 

And a pirate always brings her sword.  You had to stay sharp.

He picked up new swords in his travels: thin one-handed blades that could pick apart chainmail; stout hackers that less cut than bashed; even a real scimitar, its fine steel polished and curved.

He gave the old claymore to a ship’s boy he met on a fishing run in a dark northern ocean, and taught him to use it.  The boy wanted to fight, like Bryn had once, and he was itching for an attack, so unlikely on this lonely water. 

One day the boy would learn it wasn’t how much you fight, but who, and why.  A fight that wasn’t life or death was a waste.  Better to sit together over some aged wine, a fresh catch, and talk like women and men.  It would take the boy a long time to learn that, if ever.      

But some fights truly were life or death.   

After the explosion, when the first demons attacked them on that frozen pond, Cassandra had her sword at the ready.  It was a gleaming blade she held with power and grace.  

But Bryn had no time to watch her.  One of the demons skittered across the ice toward him, hissing, its black claws hooked and sharp.  Bryn was defenseless, and scanned the nearby snowbank for a fallen branch he could swing.  

Something shimmered in his periphery.  Atop a pile of rags, and one leather shoe, lay a sword.  He slid and stumbled to reach it, and took it by the freezing hilt.  It was an old claymore, bigger and sharper than his had been, more finely made, but it felt familiar.  It felt good.  

He dragged the tip across the ice and the blade sang.


End file.
